Elon Musk has revealed that SpaceX and Tesla are exploring a possible merger, a tie-up that would create a corporate colossus worth more than $3 trillion. Musk said on Tuesday that his two largest companies had established special committees to explore a merger. The SpaceX and Tesla CEO said the idea had a “lot of merit”, given the companies’ complementary work on artificial intelligence, but the committees had not come to any agreement on a proposal.
Musk, the world’s richest man with a net worth of more than $900bn, said that a merger would need to clear the “high hurdle” of a 50 percent vote among Tesla shareholders “Some people out there assume that a SpaceX and Tesla merger is a certainty, and I think that would be overstating it,” Musk said. But at the end of the day, the shareholders have to be supportive of this.” A SpaceX-Tesla merger would rank as the biggest corporate tie-up in history, far exceeding the $1.25 trillion union between SpaceX and xAI in February. At current valuations, SpaceX and Tesla rank as the world’s seventh- and eleventh-largest companies, respectively, with a combined market capitalisation of about $3.5 trillion.
Jerayr Haleblian, an expert in mergers and acquisitions at the University of California, Riverside, said a SpaceX-Tesla merger has “sound logic” to support it. From a technology transfer perspective, there should be significant flows of information between businesses,” Haleblian told Al Jazeera. The key to success will be synergistic innovation, which I anticipate will follow from acquisition.” Shares of SpaceX, which went public in June in the largest Initial Public Offering (IPO) of all time, rose more than 8 percent in after-hours trading following Musk’s comments.
Musk’s comments came as SpaceX on Tuesday reported its first quarterly profit, driven by strong growth in its AI and satellite-internet divisions. Net profit was $4.4bn in the July-September quarter, a reversal from a $1.05bn net loss a year earlier. Profit in the first three quarters totalled $413m, versus a loss of $2.59bn during the same period a year earlier.
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